Maybe it's because it's new, but the website doesn't offer a ton of insight into how "Fair Source" is different from other attempts to re-brand proprietary software as pseudo-open-source. For example, the FSS definition on the home page mentions "minimal restrictions," but I can't find a clear list of what those restrictions are in the FAQ[2].
(And to be clear: I'm not an ideologue around FOSS/OSS; I think source availability also benefits the commons. But I would not be surprised if FOSS/OSS people chafe at these kinds of implied-value-judgment labelings ("fair source," "commons clause") for what is fundamentally not OSS.)
The problem with "source-available" is that it has no real definition and it conveys no user freedoms at all outside of the loose freedom to read the source code, which is why the term has never taken off with anybody. It's wholly inadequate. That's why we needed a new term that does have a concrete definition and does convey user freedoms.
Fair Source is meant to sit on the gradient between Open Source and source-available. It's not meant to replace Open Source, diminish Open Source, or claim to be Open Source. It isn't Open Source, and never has been. It's definitely not trying to be a "pseudo-open-source."
It's a new term to clearly communicate something that's close to Open Source, if we envision that gradient between Open Source and source-available, and something that eventually contributes to Open Source via delayed Open Source publication (DOSP).
I think it is great Sentry folks do not pretend it is Open Source. It is great to see innovation and we will see if it becomes popular.
What I see is a lot of "single vendor" projects which carry most of development burden want their business protected while having, often minimal, contributions from community.
The "Real Open Source" though is multi-vendor - think PostgreSQL, Linux, Kubernetes among others, in which case many parties share the burden of development and maintenance but also have even playing field monetizing product.
> Dirk asked in 2021, “What’s next after ‘source-available’?” Our answer is Fair Source. I’ve made the case that it is a good way to resolve tensions that have been present in Open Source since the beginning. The net effect can be more closed-source code released to the world, and less pressure to change the Open Source Definition one way or another.
> we will see if it becomes popular
Agreed, time will tell. A major test is whether we ever see a viable fork under DOSP, seems likely years away if ever.
Looking back to the first relicense in particular, the company effectively doing a rugpull on third party users/contributors, and the trend of companies trying to pretend they aren't doing exactly that sours me on basically any 'opencore'/required CLA project. I make rare exceptions for non-profits, but only those that are mature, well established, and not the sort of non-profit that puts most of their operation under a for-profit entity.
As woodruffw mentions, these implied-value-judgement labelings are really marketing terms designed to muddle the value and importance of what it means to be an open source product.
If it doesn't work for your business, fine, don't use an OSS license. But don't expect us to slurp up your peddling when you want to pretend its an OSS license, and don't act sad when you alienate swathes of your contributors.
*EDIT*: I misspoke, my brain had thought that old Sentry licenses were GPL, they were more MITish as seen in the LICENSE file in older releases of Sentry. My mistake :\
FWIW, if Sentry had stayed MIT or even moved to AGPL, I think they would have stopped much of their newer competition from even coming to market (I'm thinking of signoz, glitchtip, vs OTEL and its million integrations here.)
My position in 2019 was that much these decisions are being driven by the VC money, and I believe that is still true today. If it weren't, they could have chosen options that served the wider community better. (I also think that wider community and the accessibility of such is what got sentry much of its initial draw, but TBH im not sure how much that bears out in reality. I haven't studied deeply enough to have a good idea of the numbers there.)
I have written quite a lot on my personal blog about our decisions and been very transparent. In particular, the decision on switching to BUSL orgininally I talk about here:
Its worth remembering that licenses are just part of the packaging of a product - part of the distribution model. Sentry is successful because we quickly found product market fit, continued to iterate, and made an affordable and well crafted product. Our distribution model - and in general our approach to affordability - is key to that, but the freedoms of open source software are less so.
For clarity, VC has never had anything to do with it, but we are certainly ambitious. Our singular goal from a product point of view is adoption, and we ensure that via accessibility and affordability. From a competitor point of view I personally think we've done better than most could dream of wrt marketshare. Companies like SigNoz don't compete with us today, and projects like GlitchTip don't even register on the market. Our competition these days is the fuzzy areas of the APM venn diagram like Datadog, New Relic, etc.
> don't act sad when you alienate swathes of your contributors
This is ill-informed, for what it's worth. Our relicensing had essentially no effect on the ratio of commits from outside the company: it went from 3.5% to 3.4%. I wrote about this when OSI published the DOSP paper that we underwrote.
> FWIW, if Sentry had stayed GPL or even moved to AGPL, I think they would have stopped much of their newer competition from even coming to market (I'm thinking of signoz, glitchtip, vs OTEL and its million integrations here.)
I'm not sure what's special here.
The company makes the source available, but doesn't accept changes from the community.
If the community really hates what the company does with the product, it can fork it.
If the company goes out of business, the license reverts to a standard OSI-approved one.
Unless I'm missing something – entirely possible – this doesn't sound like anything new and different.
From how I read the Fair Souce manifesto on their site, the company is allowed to accept and benefit patches made by dogooder developers, but those developers are not allowed to make any changes that impede on the "producer's business model", which implies that hard forks would actually be prohibited. So it's actually worse. You're allowed to do free labor for the company, and nothing/no one else.
So, since I'm an unrepentant cynic, I guess it's now, like 1.5 months until the inevitable "Sentry: it has been an interesting journey" blog post?
Anyway, so, I tried Sentry at some point, like, five years ago. Signed up for the 'team' plan, even though it's just lonely me, and had bugs coming in for about... a week, maybe less? Then, my subscription suddenly became inactive, because I had exceeded the 10K (or so, at the time) bugs that they were willing to track for me. Not, unique bugs, mind you, just the same bug that the same automated process was hitting every second or so.
But still, I now had to either negotiate an "Enterprise" price plan, or go away elsewhere. And I did actually ping them about the former, but never got a response. So, well, back to manually reading logs like an animal it is, then, I guess?
TL;DR: If your vision is to solve a certain problem, aren't the oh-we-didn't-see-that-coming corner cases the most interesting?
Sentry's been around for ~15 years, and has been using a license fitting the Fair Source definition for ~5 years. This is not a "hastily preparing ourselves to be acquired" sort of move. What makes you think this is a sign of some impending change?
Sentry's pricing plan has never gone from 10k errors straight to "negotiated enterprise deal"; you must have missed something. I say this having been a Sentry customer for the past 7 years across multiple companies, always with a paid plan beyond 10k errors and never with an enterprise deal.
The entire point of choosing to use open source projects is that if you, the author, begin to enshitify the product (Or simply start to move in a direction different from users) users can fork the project and carry on an un-enshitified version.
If you can't compete with the author, you can't do that. So what is the point of picking software using this license over traditional closed source?
It's not _just_ read, it's read and modify but not redistribute in a way that competes with the original product,
> So what is the point of picking software using this license over traditional closed source?
I don't want to compete with Sentry (or a variety of other open-like applications), but I _do_ want to support my employers identity provider, fix bugs (and push them back), and maybe even add features that I/my team use. As an example, I've personally contributed multiple bug fixes, performance improvements and documentation changes to sentry's libraries. I don't want to compete with sentry, I want them to maintain my improvements and for other developers to benefit from my work.
Another one in the long line of victims of the "popular open source product -> VC funding -> demand for profits -> closed source -> enshittification" pipeline.
Honestly generally love it. Not surprising, after all, are we at n8n Fair Code licensed ourselves(not to be confused with Fair Source). I would, however, really love it if it ended up being more inclusive and so in a joint effort rather than a divided one. More information about why we did not join here:
https://medium.com/@faircode/n8n-commits-to-fair-code-6b8923...
I wish you would have been more involved in the discussions [0] [1] leading up to this. I know you were invited to participate, since Chad shared your thoughts a few times via proxy. Regarding your main points:
1. I'm on the governance 'board' for Fair Source, and I am not associated with Sentry. All it took was involvement and deeply caring about the subject (which I know you do).
2a. The requirement for delayed Open Source publication (DOSP) could have been discussed further if there was more involvement from other non-DOSP companies other than me (before I relicensed from ELv2 to FCL). I advocated for ELv2 to be considered Fair Source, but nobody else advocated with me, and I ended up abandoning it for the FCL. I was looking forward to you discussing SUL and how it was a good fit for Fair Source, but you never did.
2b. The lack of options for self-hosted monetization (e.g. EE/CE offerings) is no longer a problem for Fair Source under the Fair Core License [0], which I drafted alongside Heather Meeker (who helped draft FSL and ELv2) to solve the problem of self-hosted monetization under the FSL or BUSL.
With that said, I think where we landed i.r.t. requiring DOSP makes sense as a differentiation vs open core and "source-available." I was originally vocally against Fair Source requiring DOSP, but the lack of involvement from other companies using ELv2, SSPL, and SUL, made the decision a little bit easier.
[+] [-] woodruffw|1 year ago|reply
Maybe it's because it's new, but the website doesn't offer a ton of insight into how "Fair Source" is different from other attempts to re-brand proprietary software as pseudo-open-source. For example, the FSS definition on the home page mentions "minimal restrictions," but I can't find a clear list of what those restrictions are in the FAQ[2].
(And to be clear: I'm not an ideologue around FOSS/OSS; I think source availability also benefits the commons. But I would not be surprised if FOSS/OSS people chafe at these kinds of implied-value-judgment labelings ("fair source," "commons clause") for what is fundamentally not OSS.)
[1]: https://fair.io/about/
[2]: https://fair.io/faq/
[+] [-] ezekg|1 year ago|reply
Fair Source is meant to sit on the gradient between Open Source and source-available. It's not meant to replace Open Source, diminish Open Source, or claim to be Open Source. It isn't Open Source, and never has been. It's definitely not trying to be a "pseudo-open-source."
It's a new term to clearly communicate something that's close to Open Source, if we envision that gradient between Open Source and source-available, and something that eventually contributes to Open Source via delayed Open Source publication (DOSP).
[+] [-] PeterZaitsev|1 year ago|reply
What I see is a lot of "single vendor" projects which carry most of development burden want their business protected while having, often minimal, contributions from community.
The "Real Open Source" though is multi-vendor - think PostgreSQL, Linux, Kubernetes among others, in which case many parties share the burden of development and maintenance but also have even playing field monetizing product.
[+] [-] whit537|1 year ago|reply
I engaged heavily with a lot of Dirk's work in my historical deep-dive:
https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/the-historical-case-f...
> Dirk asked in 2021, “What’s next after ‘source-available’?” Our answer is Fair Source. I’ve made the case that it is a good way to resolve tensions that have been present in Open Source since the beginning. The net effect can be more closed-source code released to the world, and less pressure to change the Open Source Definition one way or another.
> we will see if it becomes popular
Agreed, time will tell. A major test is whether we ever see a viable fork under DOSP, seems likely years away if ever.
[+] [-] vetrom|1 year ago|reply
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877059 (sentry FSL relicense)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38046537 (an aside about AGPL vs BUSL vs similar license schemes)- Sentry's first relicense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21466967
Looking back to the first relicense in particular, the company effectively doing a rugpull on third party users/contributors, and the trend of companies trying to pretend they aren't doing exactly that sours me on basically any 'opencore'/required CLA project. I make rare exceptions for non-profits, but only those that are mature, well established, and not the sort of non-profit that puts most of their operation under a for-profit entity.
As woodruffw mentions, these implied-value-judgement labelings are really marketing terms designed to muddle the value and importance of what it means to be an open source product.
If it doesn't work for your business, fine, don't use an OSS license. But don't expect us to slurp up your peddling when you want to pretend its an OSS license, and don't act sad when you alienate swathes of your contributors.
*EDIT*: I misspoke, my brain had thought that old Sentry licenses were GPL, they were more MITish as seen in the LICENSE file in older releases of Sentry. My mistake :\
FWIW, if Sentry had stayed MIT or even moved to AGPL, I think they would have stopped much of their newer competition from even coming to market (I'm thinking of signoz, glitchtip, vs OTEL and its million integrations here.)
My position in 2019 was that much these decisions are being driven by the VC money, and I believe that is still true today. If it weren't, they could have chosen options that served the wider community better. (I also think that wider community and the accessibility of such is what got sentry much of its initial draw, but TBH im not sure how much that bears out in reality. I haven't studied deeply enough to have a good idea of the numbers there.)
[+] [-] zeeg|1 year ago|reply
https://cra.mr/the-busl-factor
Its worth remembering that licenses are just part of the packaging of a product - part of the distribution model. Sentry is successful because we quickly found product market fit, continued to iterate, and made an affordable and well crafted product. Our distribution model - and in general our approach to affordability - is key to that, but the freedoms of open source software are less so.
For clarity, VC has never had anything to do with it, but we are certainly ambitious. Our singular goal from a product point of view is adoption, and we ensure that via accessibility and affordability. From a competitor point of view I personally think we've done better than most could dream of wrt marketshare. Companies like SigNoz don't compete with us today, and projects like GlitchTip don't even register on the market. Our competition these days is the fuzzy areas of the APM venn diagram like Datadog, New Relic, etc.
[+] [-] whit537|1 year ago|reply
> don't act sad when you alienate swathes of your contributors
This is ill-informed, for what it's worth. Our relicensing had essentially no effect on the ratio of commits from outside the company: it went from 3.5% to 3.4%. I wrote about this when OSI published the DOSP paper that we underwrote.
https://blog.sentry.io/nows-the-time-for-delayed-open-source...
> the company effectively doing a rugpull on third party users/contributors
Since Sentry has always been built by Sentry, our relicensing wasn't a rugpull. I wrote about this when Redis relicensed most recently:
https://openpath.chadwhitacre.com/2024/relicensing-and-rug-p...
[+] [-] LewisJEllis|1 year ago|reply
Sentry has never been GPL. https://blog.sentry.io/lets-talk-about-open-source/
> pretending it's an OSS license
They are not pretending it's an OSS license. The article states:
> “Just don’t call it Open Source.” Point taken. Fair Source is our new term.
[+] [-] zeeg|1 year ago|reply
We never were once GPL, or remotely copyleft.
Is this an AI generated comment?
[+] [-] cratermoon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 0_gravitas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] PreInternet01|1 year ago|reply
Anyway, so, I tried Sentry at some point, like, five years ago. Signed up for the 'team' plan, even though it's just lonely me, and had bugs coming in for about... a week, maybe less? Then, my subscription suddenly became inactive, because I had exceeded the 10K (or so, at the time) bugs that they were willing to track for me. Not, unique bugs, mind you, just the same bug that the same automated process was hitting every second or so.
But still, I now had to either negotiate an "Enterprise" price plan, or go away elsewhere. And I did actually ping them about the former, but never got a response. So, well, back to manually reading logs like an animal it is, then, I guess?
TL;DR: If your vision is to solve a certain problem, aren't the oh-we-didn't-see-that-coming corner cases the most interesting?
[+] [-] LewisJEllis|1 year ago|reply
Sentry's pricing plan has never gone from 10k errors straight to "negotiated enterprise deal"; you must have missed something. I say this having been a Sentry customer for the past 7 years across multiple companies, always with a paid plan beyond 10k errors and never with an enterprise deal.
[+] [-] the_mitsuhiko|1 year ago|reply
That’s the beauty though: if we really fuck up it eventually fully turns into open source.
[+] [-] rubinlinux|1 year ago|reply
The entire point of choosing to use open source projects is that if you, the author, begin to enshitify the product (Or simply start to move in a direction different from users) users can fork the project and carry on an un-enshitified version.
If you can't compete with the author, you can't do that. So what is the point of picking software using this license over traditional closed source?
[+] [-] maccard|1 year ago|reply
> So what is the point of picking software using this license over traditional closed source?
I don't want to compete with Sentry (or a variety of other open-like applications), but I _do_ want to support my employers identity provider, fix bugs (and push them back), and maybe even add features that I/my team use. As an example, I've personally contributed multiple bug fixes, performance improvements and documentation changes to sentry's libraries. I don't want to compete with sentry, I want them to maintain my improvements and for other developers to benefit from my work.
[+] [-] paxys|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] janober|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ezekg|1 year ago|reply
1. I'm on the governance 'board' for Fair Source, and I am not associated with Sentry. All it took was involvement and deeply caring about the subject (which I know you do).
2a. The requirement for delayed Open Source publication (DOSP) could have been discussed further if there was more involvement from other non-DOSP companies other than me (before I relicensed from ELv2 to FCL). I advocated for ELv2 to be considered Fair Source, but nobody else advocated with me, and I ended up abandoning it for the FCL. I was looking forward to you discussing SUL and how it was a good fit for Fair Source, but you never did.
2b. The lack of options for self-hosted monetization (e.g. EE/CE offerings) is no longer a problem for Fair Source under the Fair Core License [0], which I drafted alongside Heather Meeker (who helped draft FSL and ELv2) to solve the problem of self-hosted monetization under the FSL or BUSL.
With that said, I think where we landed i.r.t. requiring DOSP makes sense as a differentiation vs open core and "source-available." I was originally vocally against Fair Source requiring DOSP, but the lack of involvement from other companies using ELv2, SSPL, and SUL, made the decision a little bit easier.
[0]: https://github.com/fairsource/fair.io/issues/14
[1]: https://github.com/fairsource/fair.io/issues/21
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] ramon156|1 year ago|reply